TorMarkets — frequently asked questions

A Tor marketplace is an online marketplace that operates as a Tor v3 hidden service. The marketplace’s identity is the 56-character onion string rather than a DNS name. Buyers and vendors transact through marketplace-arbitrated multisig escrow, with disputes adjudicated by moderators on PGP-signed evidence.

Install Tor Browser from the official Tor Project site. Paste any verified onion URL from this directory into the browser’s address bar. Press enter. Do not click through to a marketplace from a search-engine result and do not accept addresses from chat groups — type or paste from a verified source directly.

There is no single best marketplace for every use case. Anubis is the multi-coin choice (BTC + LTC + ETH + XMR). Mars and Osiris are the availability picks. WeTheNorth is Canadian-focused and bilingual. Crown has a bespoke UI. Each operator’s strength is documented on its TorMarkets detail page.

Safe relative to what? Tor marketplaces are subject to operator exit scams, phishing clones, vendor scams and law-enforcement seizures. The mitigations are mechanical: verify onion URLs against signed sources, do not keep large balances on marketplace accounts, use Monero for settlement, and read vendor histories before placing first orders.

Every onion URL on TorMarkets is sourced from the operator’s most recent detached-PGP-signed Dread announcement. We import each operator’s public key once, then verify the signature on every subsequent announcement. URLs surfaced outside Dread — Telegram, Reddit, email — are not authoritative.

The terms are usually interchangeable. "Darknet market" is the older term, originating with the Silk Road era. "Tor marketplace" is the more precise modern term — it specifies which anonymity network (Tor) the marketplace lives on, distinguishing it from I2P-based or Lokinet-based alternatives that exist but are tiny by comparison.

Buyers fund an account by sending cryptocurrency to a marketplace-generated deposit address. Funds credit the account balance after the configured confirmation count is reached on-chain. Order payments draw against the account balance into a multisig escrow pool. Vendors withdraw realised earnings on a schedule of their choice, also via marketplace-generated addresses.

Refunds happen through the dispute process. If a buyer reports a problem with an order before the escrow window closes, a moderator pair reviews PGP-signed evidence from both sides and decides whether to release funds back to the buyer. Outside the dispute window, refunds depend on the vendor’s discretion.